bscanlan

Fun article, the phenomenon is interesting to see in practice, I've seen it regularly with newer instance types as it can take time for people to add them to their configurations.

We're heavy users of spot here in Intercom. I spot-checked our biggest workload, and this week we could have paid around 10% less if we were able to get the cheapest spot host possible in us-east-1 that is suitable for our workload (all 16xlarge Gravitons). However that would be at the cost of fleet stability, I think that to run relatively large production services used in realtime on spot you need to prioritise fleet stability, so choosing the "Capacity Optimized" strategy. We've seen incessant fleet churn when trying out cost optimised strategies.

Intercom is pretty similar. We use EC2 hosts and no containers (other than for development/test environments and some niche third-party software that is distributed as Docker containers). Autoscaling groups are our unit of scalability, pretty much one per workload, and we treat the EC2 hosts as immutable cattle. We do a scheduled AMI build every week and replace every host. We use an internally developed software tool to deploy buildpacks to hosts - buildpacks are pre-Docker technology from Heroku that solves most of the problems containers do.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend building this from scratch today, it was largely put in place around 8 years ago, and there are few compelling reasons for us to switch.

> Under the EU Internet Forum, the Commission has launched an expert process with industry to map and preliminarily assess, by the end of 2020, possible technical solutions to detect and report child sexual abuse in end-to-end encrypted electronic communications, and to address regulatory and operational challenges and opportunities in the fight against these crimes.

It is a spectacular overreaction to equate this to "EU wants to ban encryption". This will never happen.

On one hand, this type of service merely solves business intent with unfriendly or un-automatable interfaces. Why should this exist and be so successful? On the other, I guess it's like Segment or Tray.io, gluing together various services to improve business outcomes, and taking their slice of the efficiency improvements they make possible. I guess the most commonly integrated services should wake up and see the potential revenue they're losing in having crumby interfaces, and in the meantime UIPath will provide a good path for efficient IT services. Fair play to them in executing so well in this space.

I miss #wtf. I hope it lives on in Slack.